I am a political activist who has worked and lived in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog chronicles my time in Palestine and also provides news and analysis about Palestine and the situation on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Friday, January 31, 2014

late on Friday afternoon (Palestinian time), more than 300 Palestinians from across the Occupied West Bank repopulated the village of Ein Hijleh in the Jordan valley. By early evening the number had grown to more than 500 people, with Palestinians from Nablus, Jerusalem, Bilin, Nabi Saleh and many other towns and villages joining the protest camp.

In a similar vein to the establishment of Bab Al Shams in 2013, the Mileh Al-Ard (Salt of the Earth) camp seeks to restablish Palestinian presence on Palestinian land to protest Israel's ongoing colonisation and ethnic cleansing.

I have included below the press release issued by activists, as well as photos from activists. I will continue to update Live from Occupied Palestine with news of Ein Hijleh as more news comes to hand.

To get real time updates, you can follow activists at Ein Hijleh on twitter using the hashtags:#EinHjleh and #MilehalArdIn solidarity, Kim

Hundreds
of Palestinians announced today the launching of “Melh Al-Ard”
(Salt of the Earth) campaign by reviving the village of Ein Hijleh in
the Jordan Valley on land belonging to the Orthodox Church and St.
Gerassimos monastery. The campaign is launched in refusal of Israeli
policies aimed at Judaizing and annexing the Jordan Valley.

Campaign
organizers and participants declared,

We, the
daughters and sons of Palestine, announce today the revival of Ein
Hijleh village as part of Melh Al-Ard campaign in the Jordan Valley.
The action aims at refusing the political status quo, especially
given futile negotiations destroying the rights of our people for
liberation and claim to their land.

Accordingly
we have decided to revive an old Palestinian Canaanite village in the
Jordan Valley next to so called “Route 90” linking the Dead Sea
to Bisan. The action is part of a continuous step against the Israeli
occupation’s plan to take over and annex the Jordan Valley. This
step is a popular act against Israeli oppression of the Palestinian
people and the constant Judaization of the land.

From the
village of Ein Hijleh, we the participants announce that we hold
tight to our right to all occupied Palestinian lands. We refuse
Kerry’s Plan that will establish a disfigured Palestinian state and
recognizes the Israeli entity as a Jewish State. Such a state will
turn Palestinians living inside lands occupied in 1948 into residents
and visitors that can be deported at anytime. We affirm the unity of
our people and their struggle wherever they are for our inalienable
rights.

Ein
Hijleh village is located in what is called “Area C” in the
Jordan Valley, which is under threat of annexation by Israeli
policies and Kerry’s plan. Therefore, we have decided to take
charge and call for a national action to protect the Jordan Valley
and put an end to the constant Judaization of Palestinian lands.

Based on
our support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS)
we call upon our friends and international solidarity groups to stand
with the demands of the Palestinian people and boycott all Israeli
companies including Israeli factories and companies that work in the
Jordan Valley and profit from Palestinian natural resources.

For
instance, we ask you to boycott Mehadrin, the largest Israeli
exporter of fruits and vegetables, some of which grown in the Jordan
Valley. In addition, Hadiklaim, that exports dates produced by
Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley. We also call on you to boycott
both Ahava and Premier, cosmetics companies that use Dead Sea
minerals to produce its products.

Our
Palestinian village is located near Deir Hijleh or St. Gerassimos
monastery, on land that is property of the Orthodox monastery. The
land mainly consists of few deserted old houses and palm trees. The
white soil is highly concentrated with salt, and the area is
surrounded by lands taken and used by Israeli settlers. An Israeli
base is separating the land from Deir Hijleh monastery which owns a
property of about 1000 dunams, some of which are taken by Israeli
forces for the excuse of “security reasons.”

The
campaign, “Melh A-lArd” (Salt of the Earth), quotes a phrase from
the bible, Matthew 13:5, which says, “You are the salt of the
earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty
again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and
trampled underfoot.” The name of our village, Ein Hijleh, is based
on the original Canaanite name and the water spring (Ein) present
there.

We the
sons and daughters of Ein Hijleh call upon our people to join the
struggle to revive the village and protect our rights, history,
culture, and land. Daughters and sons of Palestine, be the salt of
this earth and stay steadfast on it.MEDIA CONTACT: Diana Alzeer, 0592400300 or 0525339054

Saturday, January 25, 2014

as you will be well aware, this blog is primarily dedicated to providing
updates, news and information about Palestine. I do occasionally post
on other issues in the Middle East. Today, my post is specifically
about Australia and the 226th anniversary of the European colonisation
and ethnic cleansing of this country.

Among other things, one of the reasons, I became active in the Palestine solidarity campaign
was because I saw the similarities between the Indigenous struggle of
the Palestinian people and the struggle of Indigenous Australians.
Coming from a family of mixed heritage (my mother is Aboriginal and my father comes from a mixed European background), my first engagement with political activism
was around Aboriginal and Indigenous rights and the struggle for land
rights and justice in this country.

Today, the 26th January, is marked officially as "Australia Day",
however, to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders (the Indigenous
people of Australia), the day is known asInvasion Day and/or Survival Day.
On this day, we commemorate and remember the struggle of Indigenous
Australians against colonisation, dispossession and injustice and
continue to mark the fact that the struggle for Indigenous Australian
rights continues in this country.

In 2012, I wrote a longer post on this issue, which you can read here. It discusses in more detail the history of Aboriginal resistance to European colonisation in Australia. As I noted in my 2012 post:

Aboriginal Australians have
been no different from the Palestinians in fighting back against ethnic
cleansing and settler-colonisation. Our people actually carried out an
extensive armed resistance to European settler colonialism. This
resistance began the moment Cook set foot on Australian soil in 1770 –
the Gweagal people attacked Cook’s landing party with spears and
woomeras. From that moment on Aboriginal resistance never ceased.

This week in Melbourne, Aboriginal resistance to invasion hit the
headlines once again when for the second year in a row, the cabin of
James Cook (the British sailor credited with "discovering" Australia)
was grafittied, drawing attention to the fact that January 26th is not a
day of celebration for the Indigenous population of this country.
During the week in Sydney, around the area where Cook first landed,
graffiti also appeared noting that Australia was built on the genocide
of the Indigenous population.

Cook's cabin with graffiti

Predictably the graffiti caused outrage in the majority of the mainstream media and
among many non-Indigenous Australians, all of whom were more concerned
about some paint on a few bricks than the fact that a genocidal invasion
had occurred in order to establish European colonies in this country. One of the better reports appeared on the Australian public multicultural broadcaster, SBS. You can read the report here.

When my friend, the comedian Aamer Rahman,
tweeted congratulations to whoever graffitied Cook's cabin on twitter,
he was inundated with a barrage of racist comments and threats, quickly
revealing the racist underbelly that exists in Australia.

This of course comes as no surprise to many of us engaged in anti-racism campaigning in Australia. A study done in 2012 found
that Australians engaged in nationalist activities, such as flag waving
on Australia were more likely to be racist. According to the study:
"People who had flags on their cars, 43 per cent of them believe the
White Australia Policy had saved Australia from problems that other
countries had experienced". WA University anthropologist Farida Fozdar
who carried out the study noted that: "There were a lot of people who
felt negative towards Muslim Australians particularly and towards asylum
seekers particularly."

David Beniuk from his 1988 "UnAustralian Folk Songs"

26 January

Today, on Invasion Day while we remember that "white Australia has a
black history" and commemorate the resistance of the Indigenous
Australians and the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
and our cultures, it is also important that we stand in solidarity with
refugees who are being incarcerated by the repeated Australian
governments (including the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott govts) in hell holes on Manus
Island and Nauru.

Australia now has one of the most draconian and
cruel refugee and asylum seeker policies in the world (Israel, it should
be said, probably has the second most draconian and cruel refugee
policy). Every day in Australia, we hear of some new atrocity or some
new human rights abuse or some new humiliation of refugees and asylum
seekers, responsibility for which lay at the feet of the current
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Immigration Minister,
Scott Morrison.

I am proud to say that many Aboriginal activists have been at the forefront of the campaign in support of refugees and asylum seekers, because as Robbie Thorpe notes in the video below Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have also born the brunt of racism.

Today, on Invasion Day, a salute to all those who have resisted and continue to resist!

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Dear friends, as you will no doubt be aware, Ariel Sharon - the Butcher of Beirut - has died. In the wake of his death, we are now seeing widespread attempts both in Israel and internationally to rehabilitate and whitewash his actions and legacy. Sharon has been described by various mainstream media outlets as "flawed", "controversial", "complicated" and even a "peacemaker" and "hero". Ariel Sharon, however, was none of these things.

Ariel Sharon was a mass murder, who was responsible for the death of up to 3000
Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon in 1982. He was a mass murder, who was
responsible for the death of 70 Palestinians in Qibya in 1953 and many more in Jenin and across the West Bank in 2002. Sharon was a mass
murder who was responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinians
over several decades. He was a racist,
an ethnic cleanser, genocidist and war criminal. While Israeli politicians, mainstream media (both in Israel and internationally) attempt to whitewash his legacy, Human Rights Watch has correctly noted that:

Ariel Sharon died without facing justice for his role in the massacres
of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by Lebanese militias in
the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The killings
constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While Sharon's human rights abuses and war crimes are legion, it is the massacre of unarmed Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp which he is most infamous for. In 1982, supposedly in retaliation for the attempted assassination of the
Israeli ambassador in London, Israel invade Lebanon. The
assassination attempt, however, was not carried out by Arafat’s PLO but
by a rival militant group. Israel, who wanted to oust the PLO from
Lebanon, used the attempted assassination to launch an invasion
supposedly in the name of destroying the PLO. On 6 June 1982, under the direction Israel's Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, the Zionist state
began its invasion and occupation of Lebanon, sending in more than
60,000 troops.

In the wake of the assassination of Lebanese President, Bashir Gemayel, who was killed by a member of the Syrian Nationalist Party, Israeli troops surrounded the twin refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila on September 15. Commanding officers from Israel's Occupation Forces (IOF) were stationed in a number of highrise buildings, allowing
them a panoramic view of the two camps for the next three days. From
September 15 through to September 16, Israel carried out non-stop
shelling of the two camps, which was home to 20,000 unarmed Palestinian
refugees. On the afternoon of September 16, 150 Christian Phalangists,
trained by and under the direction and control of the Israeli forces,
entered the camps. The Israeli military cordoned off the camps ensuring
no-one could escape. For the next 40 hours, with the full knowledge
and cooperation of the Israel military, the Phalangist forces tortured,
brutalised, raped and massacred the unarmed inhabitants of Sabra and
Shatila.

On September 18, the first western journalists were
able enter the camps. They saw first hand the tortured and mutilated
bodies of the refugees. Robert Fisk, one of the first foreign
journalists to enter Sabra and Shatila wrote that what he and his fellow
journalists found what could only described as “a war crime”

In his book, Pity the Nation, Fisk recalled that:

“Jenkins
and Tveit [fellow journalists] were so overwhelmed by what we found in
Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill
Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was
"Jesus Christ" over and over again. We might have accepted evidence of a
few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. But
there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their
waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows
of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall.
There were babies - blackened babies because they had been slaughtered
more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a
state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded
US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of
whiskey”.

Above and below: images of the massacre in Sabra and Shatila

Fisk went on to recounted how:

“Down a laneway to our right, no
more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There
were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been
wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot
point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of
flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or
black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated,
his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his
torn intestines”.

“The eyes of these young men were all open.
The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old. They were dressed in jeans and
coloured shirts, the material absurdly tight over their flesh now that
their bodies had begun to bloat in the heat. They had not been robbed.
On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the correct time, the
second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last energies
of its dead owner”.

“On the other side of the main road, up a
track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several
children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a
pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head
of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short dark curly
hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face.
She was dead”.

“Another child lay on the roadway like a
discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could
have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been
blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a
tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had
killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting
sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her
eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror”.

Robert Fisk on the massacre in Sabra and Shatila

The massacre shocked the world. Israel’s Prime
Minister Menachim Begin was forced to resign. In December 1982, the UN
declared the massacre to be an act of genocide (despite the fact that
all Western democracies abstained on the vote). An Israeli judicial
commission found that the Israeli military had abandon its duty of care
and that Ariel Sharon was “personally responsible” for the massacre.
However, neither Sharon or any member of the Israeli military or the
Christian Phalange were every punished for the war crimes they
facilitated and carried out. In 2001, the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila,
Ariel Sharon became the Prime Minister of Israel.

During his time as Prime Minister of Israel, Israel's Occupation Forces killed more than
1,430 Palestinian civilians and illegally demolished.hundreds of Palestinian homes in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza. Sharon's decision to unilaterally "disengage" from Gaza was not an act of peace, as Israeli politicians and much of the mainstream media have argued. Instead, it was simply an attempt to sure up Israel's control of the Occupied West Bank and facilitate Israel's ongoing colonisation of the West Bank and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the region.

As Human Rights Watch has noted:

In 2005 he ordered Israel’s withdrawal of nearly 8,000
settlers from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of four West Bank
settlements, but during his term as prime minister, the number of
Israeli settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the
Golan Heights, increased
from roughly 388,000 to 461,000. The transfer by an occupying power of
its civilians into an occupied territory is a grave breach of the Geneva
Conventions, and a potential war crime.

Israel's disengagement from Gaza did not end the occupation of Gaza, it just changed how Israel facilitated the occupation. Rather than carrying out an occupation by stationing troops on the ground inside Gaza, Sharon withdraw Israeli troops and turned Gaza into an open air prison controlled by Israel from the outside. As Robert Fisk has noted in the wake of Sharon's death that the main stream toadying journalists have rushed to "remake history" and whitewash Sharon's image, actions and legacy (to read Fisk's full article, please click here and to read his 30th anniversary report on the massacre, click here)

Sharon's brutality, cruelty and legacy, however, can not be whitewashed no matter how much Israel's apologist try.

In the wake of Sharon's death, it is important that we remember
and mourn Sabra, Shatila and Qibya and the thousands of others of who died at Sharon's hands. However, even more importantly, in the wake of Sharon's death, our resolve should be to take a stand and organise against Netanyahu and all those who continue Sharon's legacy today. One way we can do this is by joining and actively getting involved in the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

Demand
justice, human rights and self-determination for the people of Palestine and boycott Israel.

Milany
Boutros Alha Bourje holds a picture of herself, standing over her dead
family after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in her home at the Shatila
Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut January 11, 2014. Credit: Reuters/Caren Firouz

(Reuters) - Abu Jamal still remembers when Lebanese militiamen allied to
Israel woke him and his family early one September morning more than
three decades ago and dragged them out into the street.

The gunmen forced him and other
Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps to line up,
separated the men and women, and dragged young men from the line to be
killed. Abu Jamal's son, 19 at the time, was among those they chose.

"He
was in his last year of school," said Abu Jamal, who wears a button
with his son's picture on his sweater and asked that his full name not
be used. "He never saw his diploma."

Israeli
troops did not intervene during the bloodshed, which went down as one
of the worst atrocities of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. Ariel Sharon,
who died on Saturday, was defence minister at the time and many
Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila still blame him for the hundreds of
killings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly,
survivors showed little sympathy when they heard of the Israeli
commander-cum-politician's passing after eight years in a coma.

Sitting
in her home down the street from where a memorial stands at the site of
a mass grave, 70-year-old Milany Boutrous Alha Bourje recalled how her
husband and son were shot dead that day. Sharon, she said, deserved far
worse than he got.

"May God send
him deep into the earth," she said, black and white photos of her slain
family decorated with red artificial roses leaning against the wall
beside her.

"I wish he had suffered
as we've suffered. Thirty-two years we've been suffering. He was in his
state for eight years, but I wished he'd suffered for another 10."

Bourje,
who appears in an iconic photograph of the 1982 massacre crying out and
waving her arms near a row of bodies, said she was no more optimistic
about the future now Sharon was dead."Nothing changes," she said. "The situation we are living in does not change."

A
1983 Israeli inquiry found Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for
not preventing the bloodshed, pushing him to resign as defence minister.
But less than two decades later he rose to lead his Likud party and was
elected prime minister.

The
killings came after the assassination of the Christian president-elect
Bashir Gemayel and Sharon argued they were part of a vendetta between
the militias and the Palestine Liberation Organisation that predated
Israel's occupation.

"TO HELL WITH SHARON"Palestinian
refugees live in dire conditions in Lebanon, where many are packed into
overcrowded, impoverished "camps" which are really more like urban
slums of concrete buildings, pot-holed roads and tangled wire.

Sabra
and Shatila in Beirut are crowded neighbourhoods of narrow alleys where
pictures of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and young men killed in
conflicts with Israel cover many walls.

Lebanese
authorities, fearful of altering the sectarian balance that underpins
the political power system, refuse to naturalise the overwhelmingly
Sunni Muslim Palestinians and ban them from a wide variety of
professions.

Many blame the arrival
of the refugees for fuelling conflict that caused Lebanon's war, during
which both Israel and Syria sent troops into the country.

Youssef
Hamzeh, born the year before Israel's 1948 founding, said he saw little
hope Palestinians' lot in Lebanon would improve soon, saying peace
talks had produced nothing.

"These negotiations are futile. All the dialogue is futile because Israel's culture is blood," he said.Standing
near a sign at the memorial reading "We will not forget," he echoed
others in the camps when he said Sharon should have been put on trial
over the killings.

"As a witness to
this person and from what I suffered from this person, I say to hell
with Sharon and to Sharon's supporters in the Israeli leadership ... who
still commit massacres," he said.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

on Saturday in Melbourne we held a small speakout for Palestinian
refugees under siege and starving in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria. The speakout was called by ASPIRE (Australian Society for Palestinian Iraqi Refugees Emergency) as it has been estimated that up to 50 people have died from starvation in Yarmouk due to the camp being under siege
with no food or medicine being able to enter the camp for 6 months. In 1948, when Israel ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and razed 500 Palestinian villages, Palestinian refugees fled to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. The size of the refugee population in these countries has grown over the years due to Israel's refusal to abide by international law and allow Palestinian refugees the right of return to their homeland. Since the war in Syria began, Palestinian refugees like the rest of the population have been at risk.

According to a statement by UNRWA on Dec 17, “of the 540,000 Palestine
refugees registered with UNRWA in Syria, about 270,000 are displaced in
the country, and an estimated 80,000 have fled. 51,000 have reached
Lebanon, 11,000 have identified themselves in Jordan, 5,000 are in
Egypt, and smaller numbers have reached Gaza, Turkey and farther afield".Yarmouk
camp was home, for many years, to 250,000 of the 540,000 Palestinians refugees living in Syria. Of those 250,000 in Yarmouk, more than 150,000 who were formally
registered as refugees. Since the war began in Syria, the vast majority
have fled to neighbouring countries. It is estimated 18,000 - 20,000
are still left in the camp, which has been under total siege since July
2013. No food, medicine or humanitarian aid has been able to get in. For the past year the camp has been without electricity or heating.
The UN puts the number of people who have died from malnutrition (ie.
starvation) at 15, but the figure is most likely higher with estimates
between 30 and 50 people having died.

The Syrian government, Israel and the international community are responsible for the plight of the refugees in Syria. Now more than ever we need to demand the right of return for not only the refugees in Syria, but all Palestinian refugees to their homeland.

It is imperative that Palestine solidarity activists, human rights activists and refugee rights activists in Australia and around the world, raise their voices in support of the refugees in Yarmouk and publicly call for an immediate end to the siege being imposed on the camp and for food and medicine to be allowed into the camp and for the safe evacuation of all those in need of medical care.For more information about the situation in Yarmouk, please see Ramzy Baroud's excellent article at Palestine Chronicle. You can access it by clicking here.

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About Me

I am an activist who, at different times over several years, has lived and worked as a international volunteer in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog is an account of my time in Palestine and also carries original news, comment and analysis (as well as reprints) on Palestine. Live from Occupied Palestine campaigns for an end to Israeli apartheid and the brutal illegal occupation of the Palestinian people. You are welcome to reprint any material from this blog authored by Kim, however, please acknowledge the author and the blog website